Exclusive! Kanye West Talks Yeezy Season 4, the Casting Call Controversy, and His Calabasas Connection

“I’m really not here for controversy,” Kanye West said. He was sitting in a West Chelsea loft 48 hours before his Yeezy Season 4 presentation, surrounded by a small team of assistants, models, and stylists, and the low-key hum of eleventh-hour show preparations. Considering that he was also just hours away from performing the first of two nights of back-to-back concerts at Madison Square Garden as part of his Saint Pablo tour, he seemed remarkably calm.

Coming from someone as famously provocative as West, those words about controversy could have been a dare. But he sounded quite sincere, especially as he talked about the clothes he was soon to show in an as yet secret location on Roosevelt Island. When it comes to his Yeezy line, West is not a fan of grandiose fashion statements. In fact, he’s not even sure he likes the word “fashion,” period. “Let’s say ‘apparel,’ especially for the style of clothes I make,” he said. “I’m not saying that this is a fashion proposition, I’m saying that this is a human proposition.”

West wants to build incrementally on the elevated army surplus staples he has been developing in his previous three Yeezy collections, honing the deliberately limited color palette of heather grays and khakis a little more each season, refining the proportions of a camouflage parka, paring back the military-inspired details on a sleeve. The results are resolutely functional, seasonless, and, West hopes, beyond trends. “I want to make pieces that can be timeless,” he said. “Pieces that you can pick up out of a vintage store in 20 years and say, ‘Wow, I’m happy I have this.’ ”

He finds his inspiration close to home, in the routines—the trips to the gym, to the airport, to dinner—of his friends and family in Calabasas, the quiet L.A. suburb of strip malls and gated communities where the stratospherically famous can reclaim a small degree of privacy. “I think it’s about embracing where me and my family live, where my kids are growing up, embracing the attitude and style of the Valley,” West said. To underscore the point, he intended the invitation for Season 4 to be accompanied by a pair of Adidas track pants, the famous three stripes interrupted by a single word: Calabasas.

West, of course—along with his wife, Kim Kardashian West, and their children North and Saint—represent one quarter of the 21st century’s most photographed family. He’s quick to recognize the irony in his desire to make clothes that express a perfect anonymity. “When people asked me, ‘if you could have a superpower, what would would it be?’ I said the ability to be invisible. And this was before I was famous,” he said. “Because there’s absolutely no way for me or my family to be invisible, I’ve put that longing for invisibility into the clothes.”

It turns out a lot of people want to be invisible—and not just the superfans who line up overnight at the pop-up stores West has been launching around the world to sell the merchandise associated with his The Life of Pablo album. He’s making inroads among the skeptics who initially felt he should stick to music. “Some of the people who might have said something negative about it are now wearing the boots from Season 2,” West noted. But the validation he enjoys most comes from the fast-fashion retailers whose wares often bear an uncanny resemblance to the work of influential designers. “I felt that when Zara took the color palettes from Season 2, it was the biggest compliment we could have had,” West said. “It made me a more authentic apparel guy. And by them doing it, it also made the world more beautiful.”

Perhaps West’s most important endorsement, though, came from Adidas. The German sportswear giant has been manufacturing the Yeezy sneakers and supplying some support for the Yeezy shows since the first season, but in June the company significantly upgraded its investment, striking a deal to greatly expand the range of Yeezy offerings, as well as to open retail outlets dedicated to the concept. West feels this will bring him the resources that he has admired at other companies. “In apparel, I’ve been able to press the button on immediate ideas,” West said. “But I was talking to [Supreme founder] James Jebbia and he was saying that an idea might be six months, a year [in development] before it even sees the light of day. And I love that. To me that’s luxury. That makes Supreme a luxury brand, to have the luxury to take six to 12 months to develop a concept.”

Where will West’s first store debut? “I believe the first one will be in California, since that’s where I stay now,” he said. “I can go by there most often, check in, get the vibe. But I want to do 200 stores in the next year. That’s just me saying what I want. I’m not saying what can definitely happen but you might as well just state out loud what you want. That’ll put you one step closer to getting it.” The Adidas investment should also allow him to address one of the most persistent criticisms of the Yeezy line: that the prices are too high for clothes that are meant to be available for all. Though he didn't offer specifics, West said, “I’m very focused on trying to make things far more affordable, far more beautiful, and for far more people.”

West may be mostly trying to avoid controversy at the moment, but controversy has a way of trailing him. When he tweeted a casting notice for the Season 4 show that specified “multiracial women only,” the backlash on social media was instantaneous. “The ten thousand people that showed up didn't have a problem with it,” West said. But he insists the concept—which came out of discussions with his longtime collaborator Vanessa Beecroft, the Italian artist who helps to stage and choreograph his shows—was not intended to exclude anyone, least of all black women. “How do you word the idea that you want all variations of black?” West said. “How do you word that exactly?”

Generally, West has been striking a conciliatory tone. During his recent speech at the VMAs, he offered an olive branch to Taylor Swift and Amber Rose, two women he has notoriously feuded with over the years. Is he in a different place these days? “That’s always the place that I was in,” West said. “I was just saying the wrong things out loud.” Does he consciously try to say things differently now? “Definitely. I try to start with ‘why.’ Why am I saying this? What’s going to happen from this? Why did I bring this up? Why did I bring that up? And to get better in real time.” Has fatherhood influenced his approach? “Definitely. You want to contribute to your kids having the best life possible. And if you’re in a position of influence, you want to do [positive] things.”

In addition to staging his fashion show—the arrangements for which he seemed to be cutting even finer than usual this season (on the morning of the show basic details like the address of the venue had yet to be revealed to the press)—West is in the middle of the North American leg of the Saint Pablo tour, an endeavor which involves him hovering over the mosh pit on an innovative suspended platform. “I feel really excited about the way the kids feel,” West said. “I wanted to come up with something that allowed me to be closer to the people and made it so there wasn’t a bad seat in the house, as best as we could try to do that.”

What can we expect once the tour is over? His wife, Kim, just dropped a hint on Snapchat that a children’s clothing line is in the works. West confirmed it. “We’ve had to make all these clothes from scratch for North and for Saint,” he said. “And in the process it was just inevitable that we make kids’ clothes. With me and my wife, we have a different perspective on the way that kids swag out. And it’s all just slowly coming together.”

Another recent hint was the billboard that appeared in L.A. showing West’s music company logo alongside Drake’s. “We’re just working on music, working on a bunch of music together, just having fun going into the studio,” West said. “We’re working on an album, so there’s some exciting things coming up soon.” He declined to give a release date.

West calls his new jewelry collaboration “a letter to my wife from a past life that can live past our lives.”

Most of West’s focus in the coming months though will be on developing his clothing concept with Adidas. “What I learned from doing the pop-ups is there’s so much possibility out there in approaching and completely disrupting the format,” he said. “And it needs to happen.”

He was interrupted by the sound of fire alarms. What turned out to be a minor fire had broken out on another floor of the building, and the occupants had to file down the staircase to the street. In West’s case, that involved the extra step of dodging a gauntlet of aggressive autograph seekers and paparazzi to get to his car, pausing briefly to say hello to Gigi Hadid, the model and extended family member who it turned out had been in the middle of a fitting in a different studio. West has the willpower to realize most of his dreams. Becoming invisible will have to wait.